The Tea That Wasn’t Tetley’s

The sea is trying to kill me. Not in the poetic, “life is drowning me” Instagrammable way people post beneath black-and-white selfies after three days of heartbreak and a Lana Del Rey playlist. No. This is cinematic annihilation with Oscar potential. Waves crash over my head like collapsing buildings, each one battering me deeper into the freezing black water. Salt water floods my mouth, burning the back of my throat like bleach. Every desperate gasp for air is punished instantly, the ocean shoving itself into my lungs like it’s trying to finish me off properly. I thrash wildly, limbs heavy and useless beneath the violent, churning sea. “HELP!” I scream, before another wave punches the word straight back down my throat. Somewhere above me, thunder cracks open the sky. Brilliant. Even the heavens are joining in. I try to swim, but I’ve lost all sense of direction — the sea thrashes me from every imaginable angle. My arms feel like lead. My lungs burn. Panic rises sharp and animalistic inside my chest. This is it, then. This is how I die. Not heroically. Not while saving a child from a burning building. Not peacefully in my sleep at eighty-seven after two reasonably priced glasses of Sauvignon Blanc and organs that had miraculously survived the early 2000s. No. I drown in the middle of nowhere like a water drenched barnacle. A woman whose final moments consist mainly of swallowing seawater and regretting carbohydrates. Another wave drags me under. Darkness swallows everything. I kick desperately, clawing upwards, until finally my hand collides with something solid. Rock. Oh thank Christ. I wrap myself around it instantly, gripping with the desperate strength of a woman whose survival instincts have bypassed dignity entirely. My chest heaves violently as I cling to it. “I’m not ready to die!” I sob dramatically into the storm. “I haven’t even written a will!” The rock says nothing. Steady. Reliable. Magnificent. I cling harder. Then — “Amanda.” A voice. Deep. Distant. Male. I freeze. This must be it. This must be God. Honestly, I expected Morgan Freeman. Not… whatever this is. Rain lashes my face as I squint into the darkness. “Amanda,” the voice calls again. Emotion punches me square in the chest. Maybe there is a God after all. Immediately, guilt floods my body. “Oh God,” I cry. “I’m sorry for not believing in you. And for cursing those church-goers every Sunday taking up all the parking spaces on our street.” Silence. Then — “Amanda… what have you taken?” Taken? I cough violently. “About twelve gallons of sea water!” I wheeze. “You need to get off my head,” the voice says. Noticeably less divine this time. …What? The storm vanishes. The sea disappears. And suddenly — I am no longer drowning in the Atlantic Ocean. I am wrapped around Tom from work. Specifically, his actual head. Like a deeply distressed octopus clinging to a buoy. There’s damp decking beneath me. The sharp smell of stale lager, cigarettes and wet wooden benches baked by years of ordinary lives and quiet regret, hangs in the air. The pub garden. And Tom — lovely, painfully sensible Tom — is half-slumped on a bench while I cling to his skull for dear life. Shame crashes into me at terminal velocity. I release him immediately and scramble backwards so quickly I nearly knock over someone's Aperol Spritz. “Oh my God,” I gasp. “I am so sorry. I thought you were a rock.” Tom stares at me for a long moment. “You’ve taken drugs.” Straight to the point. Classic Tom. I shake my head so aggressively I nearly detach a retina. “Absolutely not.” “No, you did,” he says firmly. “You’ve been rolling around on the floor waving your arms and kicking your legs for the last half hour.” Half hour? HALF HOUR? Sweet Jesus. “I thought you were having an epileptic fit,” he adds, glancing around as though checking whether he needs to call an ambulance or a priest. And instantly — like a traumatic little montage sequence — my brain hurls me backwards through time. Glastonbury 2008. The incident. The tea. God. I vowed after that experience never to touch drugs again. Technically, I hadn’t even meant to touch them in the first place. Folks, I do not condone drug use. It was merely accidental. One minute I was having the time of my life with my friends. The next minute they vanished into the crowd like the opening scene of a disaster movie. Gone. Completely swallowed by thousands of sweaty strangers wearing bucket hats, no shoes, and the unearned spiritual confidence of people who own bongos. I stumbled into a marquee feeling increasingly unwell. Too much heat. Too much booze. Too little water. And there he stood. Tall. Flowing kaftan billowing dramatically in the breeze despite there being virtually no wind whatsoever. Long hair. Sandals. He looked like Jesus if Jesus occasionally sold handmade jewellery, owns healing crystals, and has strong opinions on shrooms. There was almost a glow around him. “You look like you need a cup of tea,” he said warmly. Reader, I could have kissed him. “I could murder a tea,” I replied greedily. He handed me a steaming mug of something herbal-looking. Now, in hindsight, when a mystical desert prophet appears out of nowhere offering mystery liquids at Glastonbury, one should perhaps ask follow-up questions. But no. I drank the whole thing in one go like an absolute idiot. For approximately four minutes, I felt wonderful. Then — BAM. Not wonderful. Very, very not wonderful. Reality itself suddenly loosened around the edges like cheap wallpaper on damp walls. My consciousness fractured instantly. Not in the whimsical, spiritually enlightening way people describe in documentaries while sitting barefoot in Bali. No. This was psychological warfare. In one reality, I’m sitting on a battered sofa beside a girl who keeps asking me endless questions. “What do you do for work?” “Where do you live?” “What do you eat for breakfast?” Who asks someone what they eat for breakfast during an active psychological evacuation from reality? “I don’t feel very good,” I mumble weakly. Then suddenly — THERE’S A DRAGON. An actual fire-breathing dragon charging directly towards me like I'd personally slept with his wife. And somehow both realities are happening simultaneously. I’m on the sofa. I’m running from a dragon. I’m answering questions about cereal. The dragon gets closer. “Do you like studying hairdressing?” the girl asks pleasantly. JESUS CHRIST, WOMAN. READ THE ROOM. A DRAGON IS ACTIVELY TRYING TO KILL ME. Then suddenly — I become a statue. Completely frozen. Arms locked in bizarre positions while crowds drift past staring openly at me. “Look at that weirdo.” “What’s wrong with her?” “That girl needs help.” Correct. I do. Desperately. But I can’t move. Can’t speak. Can’t explain that my soul has temporarily detached from reality and is currently being hunted by medieval wildlife. Then — miraculously — I regain movement for half a second. Only enough to shift into another ridiculous pose. One arm on my hip. The other sticking outward. A haunted teapot. A teapot absolutely tripping its tits off. Then BAM. Back to the sofa. “Focus on my face,” the girl says gently. For the first time, I really look at her. She’s beautiful. Soft freckles scattered delicately across her nose. Tiny little constellations. But then — …the freckles start moving. No. No no no. They writhe beneath her skin like insects. Sweet merciful Christ. I feel sick. The dragon roars again somewhere behind me. The realities bleed together in horrific layers. At one point I become convinced I’m fully naked in the middle of the festival. Crowds stare. Laugh. Judge. “That is so fucked up.” “I bet her mother’s proud.” “What an absolute freak.” And honestly? Even hallucinated strangers are brutal. Meanwhile the girl keeps talking softly beside me, trying desperately to tether me back to reality while my brain burns like an overturned skip full of fireworks. “It’s just a bad trip,” she tells me calmly. “You’ll get through it.” And eventually… Somehow… I do. Barely. Though for weeks afterwards, my brain remained deeply suspicious. Every time I pressed my ear against my pillow, I could hear an entire underground nightclub happening somewhere inside the stuffing. Bassline. Crowd noise. What I can only describe as aggressively European Techno. Most inconvenient when one already suffers from insomnia. Cars driving past sounded like ice cream van jingles. Every single one. My ears would perk up instinctively. “Ooh, ice cream—“ Nope. Ford Fiesta. And bathroom locks developed personalities of their own. I would physically watch them slide themselves across the door while I sat on the toilet staring in exhausted disbelief. Honestly, there’s only so many times a woman can watch a bathroom lock crawl across the floor like a determined little silver beetle before she starts fundamentally reassessing reality. But eventually my brain repaired itself. Mostly. And I swore never again to accept mysterious tea from strange men in kaftans. Especially ones resembling Middle Eastern prophets. Well. There was that one other time. But we don’t need to get into that. Which brings us back to Tom. Lovely, dependable, spreadsheet-loving Tom. The kind of man who probably irons socks. And I’ve just spent the last thirty minutes clinging to his skull in the middle of a pub garden like a shipwreck survivor hauled from sea. Around us, life carries on offensively normally. A waitress walks past balancing six pornstar martinis on a tray. Two women on the next table are laughing so hard one of them snorts wine through her nose. “The shame,” I whisper weakly. Tom laughs nervously, “You really scared me.” “I scared myself.” Then, because it’s Tom. “You also knocked over my pint.” Sure enough, amber liquid slowly snaked across the decking boards beside us. “Oh God. I’m so sorry.” “It’s alright,” he says, still laughing slightly. “Honestly, it was watching you breaststroke past the hanging baskets that really alarmed me.” Reality slowly settles back into place around us. The smell of chips and lager. The distant clink of glasses. Safe. Ordinary. Mildly sticky. But still… It does make you wonder. Hallucinations. Are they just misfiring neurons in an exhausted brain? Stress, memory and fear colliding together into something grotesque and surreal? Or maybe… just maybe… they’re doorways. Tiny accidental tears in reality itself. And perhaps fear shapes whatever waits for us. Maybe that’s why mine always contains storms. Dragons. Judgmental strangers. And catastrophic public humiliation. Although personally? I think I’ll just stick to Tetley’s.